


Salt and Ashes

by PeniG



Series: Akashic Records [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ableist Sandalphon, Angst and Feels, Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), Other, Sodom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20233960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: Aziraphale was supposed to be Sandalphon's guide on this mission, but Sandalphon's a hard angel to steer. Nobody even knew Crawly was in town.





	Salt and Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: Genesis is vague about what the men of Sodom wanted the angels to come out for, but in Ezekiel 16:48–50, God compares Jerusalem to Sodom, saying "Sodom never did what you and your daughters have done...She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me." Robbery gangs who couldn’t be prosecuted due to a technicality, laws against hospitality, and Lot’s wife revealing she had guests when she went to borrow salt are from Apocrypha Now, a modern retelling of materiel that used to be part of the Bible but isn’t anymore, by Mark Russell, illustrated by Shannon Wheeler, Top Shelf Productions, 2016.
> 
> I made up the bit about the invention of rolling johns. Population figures are based on nothing at all; the only estimate I’ve seen for the population of Sodom and Gomorrah is from the website accuracyingenesis.com, and is between 600 and 1200 people, but that’s not quite big enough for the john-rolling to work for long. It's still very small potatoes compared to Sumer, which at its height had an estimated population of 50-80K.

“Keep going!” Aziraphale shouted at Lot, who seized his daughters’ hands and dragged them along, trailing wails of dismay. Aziraphale leaped, too slowly, and found himself spread at full protection between Sandalphon and a pillar of salt. “Stop! Just _stop!_ You have so far exceeded your authority -“

“No, I _haven’t!_” Sandalphon bellowed. “She looked back! You told her not to, and she did! Plus she sold us out for a cup of salt!”

“She did _not_ sell us out! She needed the salt to finish preparing a meal for us!”

“We don’t need to eat!”

“But _she_ needs to feed guests!” They were aspect to aspect, Sandalphon hovering to get right into Aziraphale’s face, but he held firm because he was Right this time, no ifs, ands, or buts. “It’s not about_ us_, it’s about _them_!”

“_I’m_ the one who gets to decide what it’s about!”

“Ten righteous men, we were supposed to be looking for _ten righteous men_ -“

“That wasn’t the mission, that was you and Lot haggling! An emergency arose and I had to deal with it! That’s why _I_ was put in charge and _you_ were assigned as guide!”

“That was _not_ an emergency! It would have been simple enough to deal with if _you_ hadn’t gone off half-cocked and started smiting left and right!”

“Smiting was how I chose to deal with it! That was the whole population of the town clamoring to, to -“

“To _what_, Sanadalphon? What exactly did you think they were going to do to us? To a couple of angels who could sidestep them, restrain them, evade their notice, heal any damage immediately -“

“You can’t restrain and evade and sidestep all those humans at once!”

“Yes you _can!_ There were only fifty of them! If you hadn’t gotten nervy -“

“_I did not_ -“

“No, you were _past_ nervy, you were _scared_!”

“I was _revolted_!”

“You were _scared_ and you lost your temper! If you’d kept your head I would have _shown_ you -“

“Shown me_ what?_ How to let things go from bad to worse? I ought to smite you, for insubordination!”

_“Do it and see where it gets you!”_

For a moment Aziraphale thought that he would. For a moment, he wanted him to - discorporation would send his soul straight to Heaven where he could make his complaint first and forcefully. But the moment stretched out, and out, and out, eye-to-eye, and he had plenty of time to realize how cold and hard Sandalphon’s eyes were, to wonder whether smiting an angel would be enough to make another angel Fall; but the flaming sword with which Sandaslphon smote the two cities remained still.

In the burning stinking ruins of Sodom, a building collapsed.

“I think we both need to stand down,” said Aziraphale quietly. “But you’re the one with the flaming sword out.”

The hammering heart he habitually had these days beat three times. The sword winked into its extradimensional sheath. Sandalphon folded his wings and landed on the balls of his feet, ready to leap into action again at any moment. “Zoar’s still standing.”

“And if it doesn’t stay that way, who on the plains is left to - benefit - from your excessive display of divine wrath?”

“Fine! I’ll leave it. But you are _not_ in a position to question my executive decisions. _I’m_ lead on this mission. It _could_ have been you. But Gabriel knew you’d be too generous if the decisions were up to you.”

“He still assigned me as your guide. He would hardly have done that if he intended you to ignore my advice.”

“I didn’t ignore your advice!”

“No, you didn’t give me time to give you any.” Aziraphale took a deep breath that tasted of smoke and salt and charring meat. “We came here looking for ten righteous men. Lot offered us hospitality, which under the complex and generally deplorable legal system of Sodom was not his right to do. But hospitality has its own laws, and Tamar -“

“Who?”

“Our hostess? Lot’s wife? _Woman you turned to salt?”_

“Oh, the woman who decided she had to have more salt so bad she went next door to borrow some and tell the world our business?”

“That was an _accident._”

“Which brought the whole town after us!”

“The _whole town_ would have been 2,517 men, women, children, and infants, not fifty men! Even if the whole town _had_ come for us, _so what_? We’re _angels_. We could have _handled_ it. And then we could have gone on with our duty to search for the ten righteous. But instead of letting me explain what was really going on and propose a solution,_ you_ called in an_ air strike_!”

“Look,” said Sandalphon, with the strained impatient patience of an adult talking to a stupid child, “I know your perspective is warped by being on the ground constantly, but I can only humor you so much. Gabriel and I ran the numbers before I left. We weren’t going to find ten righteous men.”

“You_ do_ not and _cannot_ know that. In a situation in which the most powerful people in a group have structured the group to favor their unrighteousness, the righteous - who _have_ to live in the group, humans _cannot_ just strike out on their own on a whim, they don’t _function_ that way - have to -“

Sandalphon rolled his eyes. “Gab gab gab, do you _ever_ shut up? We get the _big_ picture upstairs. God has a soft spot for Lot’s family, so we decided to put some feet on the ground and make things as easy on them as we could. But this?” He waved his arm at the burning cities. “This was _always_ going to happen. Maybe, if we’d done things your way, we would have extracted some more people, kids who hadn’t sinned much, that sort of thing. Rewarding the righteous, yeah, wouldn’t hurt. But if we spared these cities, you know what would have happened to those kids? They’d have grown up to be _more_ hardened sinners. The cities of the plain were at the tipping point.”

“The what?”

“That’s what the accountants call it. Sinners go to Hell, right? That’s a win for the Adversary.”

“By that token, you just handed them a _huge_ win.”

“Yeah, yeah, they’ll be processing the influx for awhile. But the alternative to handing them a big win now would be handing them a way bigger number of little wins, one soul at a time, over the next century or so. Because if we don’t smite, nothing changes. Or maybe other cities think -“

“Cities can’t think anything.”

“Cities are the new unit of measure, all right? The taint spreads if we don’t nip it in the bud. But, we wipe these cities out now, Lot spreads the word it was for their sins, we harvest all the souls in them that aren’t quite hellworthy yet, other cities shape up, and we’ve cut our losses. Do you get it now?”

Aziraphale stared at him. “That’s - that’s -“

“That’s divine wisdom. You really gonna question divine wisdom?”

Aziraphale found himself unable to speak at all, as if his vocal apparatus had discorporated without him.

Sandalphon smiled. He did not have a pleasant smile. “That’s what I thought.”

With a mighty effort, Aziraphale pointed over his shoulder at what remained of Tamar and got his speech working. “And her? Who gets her?”

“Dunno. Don’t care. Not my department. But I was doing you and all the other grunts down here a _favor_.”

“How is smiting someone I’m responsible for a _favor?_”

“You ordered her not to look back. She disrespected you. I knew you’d never give her consequences, so I did it for you. Spared you the trouble. _You’re welcome.”_

Aziraphale threw his hands in the air and turned away. “You don’t - you don’t even know what my job _is_, do you?” He cupped the salt curve of Tamar’s anguished face with one hand, but her soul was gone, not to be recalled by any effort of which he was capable, and crystals of salt fell from beneath his hand. “I’m supposed to protect them.”

“You’re _supposed_ to follow the will of Heaven,” said Sandalphon.

“God didn’t mandate this. You and Gabriel did.” Aziraphale stared at Tamar’s blank gray-white eyes. The sty in the left one was now a single salt crystal bulging on the lower lid. He’d been planning to remove that, after dinner, but during dinner the robbery gang had come to demand their chance at their semi-lawful prey.

Sooner or later, they would have noticed that they weren’t attracting travelers anymore. That their trade was dwindling to nothing. That if they didn’t clean up their act, they would be left preying on themselves till nothing remained. He and Sandalphon could have accelerated the process. Singling out the righteous for blessings would have done it. Blessings worked so much better than punishment. If only -

Sandalphon laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. Aziraphale jumped, but did not turn around.

“I probably shouldn’t do this,” said Sandalphon, “but nobody’s actually told me not to explain things to you, and the situation is bugging Gabriel, so I’m gonna go through it once. You know why you’ve been down here so long?”

“Because I failed in Eden.”

“Yeah, yeah, Michael crippled you so it’s easiest to leave you in place till you make up for the screw up. But you’ll _never_ make up for the screw up. Michael and Gabriel had a shouting match about it when Gabriel took charge of Earthly Operations.”

“I’m sorry to have been the cause of dispute between them.”

“He didn’t like having to take her maimed leftovers. But she was your CO and he couldn’t cancel the punishment. So they settled the fight with a deal. All you have to do is discorporate and come home the hard way. You’ll get a brand-new body then, functional wings and all.”

Aziraphale turned around at that, shaking the hand off.

“You can’t imagine how much I wanted to discorporate you just now,” said Sandalphon. “And _not_ because I want you up there. You can stew down here forever for all of me. But Gabriel’s gotten to like you. _He_ wants you. So I was a twitch away from giving you to him. Only, Gabriel_ needs_ me, and smiting another angel wouldn’t look good. He’d have to discipline me, whether he wanted to or not. Maybe even send me down here for a spot of guardianing.”

Aziraphale tried to imagine Sandalphon curing a wart, talking a suicide into putting down the hemlock cup, or countering one of Crawly’s subtle temptations, and shuddered inwardly. Aloud he said: “That might be good for you.”

“It wouldn’t. And it wouldn’t be good for Gabriel, either. He _needs_ me. But he_ wants_ you.”

“What in heaven for?”

“Never asked him. If Gabriel wants it, that’s enough for me. Ought to be enough for you, too.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. I have my assignment. If he wants to recall me, he only has to recall me.”

“Not under the terms of the agreement with Michael! If he recalls you, he can’t give you the new body! Not without her countersigning, and she _won’t_ unless you’ve discorporated.”

“Since I’m perfectly content with the body I’ve got, I don’t see why this is a problem. I’m also content with the assignment I’ve got. If Gabriel’s worried about me, I thank him for his concern, but it’s entirely misplaced.”

“There’s _also_ the deal that you’re bad for morale. Nobody else has been down here this long without discorporating. Nobody else even comes close. Longest run was 95 years. _Ninety-five years!_ We’re talking fully able-bodied angels, and not one of ‘em has lasted a tenth of the time you’ve gimped around down here. You know how that makes them _feel_?”

“I would hope it would put them on their mettle and make them less dependent on their wings to get them out of trouble. In any case, it’s not my business. If another angel needs my help I’m only too happy to give it, but -”

Sandalphon rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth. “You really are thick as a brick, aren’t you? Discorporating is _easy_. Keeping a body together is _hard_. And you’re the champion! You are _always_ going to be the champion of guarding your own skin! You will lose _nothing_, nobody will _mind_, if, after a thousand-odd years, you _finally_ let yourself get eaten by a lion or ripped up by a demon or take a tumble down a cliff! Nobody will even think less of you for it! Gabriel will be happy, so everybody will be happy.”

Aziraphale blinked at him. “You aren’t - no. You _can’t_ be suggesting that I deliberately destroy this body in order to evade my duty, sidestep a punishment I accepted, and go back to Heaven for a shiny new one?”

Sandalphon grinned at him.

“That’s _obscene._”

“Obviously you’d want to make it look good, but I’m telling you, Gabriel’d be so glad to have you home fully-functional, he won’t think twice about how you got there.”

“I was already intending to file a complaint about your handling of this mission,” said Aziraphale so coldly the ambient temperature dropped five degrees. “I will now have to consider whether to add this - temptation to insubordination - to the charges, or to let it go under the heading of your being a little too anxious to please your boss.”

“Complain away,” said Sandalphon. “I told you, Gabriel wants you, but he needs me. In a game of I-say-you-say, I’m the one getting the benefit of the doubt. There’s always doubt in these cases.”

“Perhaps in Heaven. On Earth, everything’s recorded. A simple search -“

“There are no simple searches. And I handle all the research requests for the department. Think about it.” Sandalphon stepped back and spread his wings into launch position. “Anyway, I have a report to make. Have fun submitting your complaint!”

Aziraphale didn’t watch him go, but surveyed the smoking ruins of Sodom and Gommorah. He was so tired of disasters! Destruction was never as thorough as people or angels thought it ought to be, and he’d already been distracted much too long, so he extended his senses and caught a faint shimmer of human life, somewhere in the burning rubble of Gommorah.

_How -?_ It didn’t matter, he was already running. At times like this, he did indeed miss the wings.

The flickers of life grew fewer and fainter as he approached, and when he finally reached them were barely showing through a mound of rubble. He beat out the remaining fires with his wings and unmanifested them still smoking, mud bricks scorching his hands and crumbling into dirt as he hurled them aside. If only he could turn into something that _burrowed_! Crawly’d tried to teach him once, over 900 years ago when they’d holed up in a rock shelter while a storm passed, and it had ended with both of them paralyzed with laughter and Aziraphale stuck with rabbit whiskers for several hours. If Crawly were here -

Oh, Lord, Crawly _was_ here, his aura small and dim and pulled-in upon itself, down under the rubble with the fading human lives - “Crawly!” Aziraphale bellowed, shoving armfuls of loose particulate clay and blackened cinders aside and miracling them from falling back into the hole. “Crawly! Help me, or I can’t save anyone! Crawly!”

The rubble collapsed and he fell with it into a cellar, the debris continuing to patter down around him as he launched himself toward the shadows where the last resident of Gommorah breathed her last. He knelt beside her feeling sick and ashamed.

“Too late, angel!” Crawly surged out of the shadows so hard she knocked him over, and straddled his chest, the desperate bereft love of the abandoned rolling off her, mixed with all the losses of her life and of this hideous day. Aziraphale promptly went limp. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, killing them all and then coming too late to sssave the lasst of them! Are you here to gloat? Are you here to tell them their sssssinssss?” She bent over to hiss at close range, venom stinging like acid as it dripped on his face. “Well, you’re too late! And you can’t take credit for thisss, either, it’sss mine! My sssside won here - we won -“ Her breaths started coming in gasps - “I won - itsss my fault, I did thisss, _dammit angel_, fight me or cusss at me or sssomething, jussst, what’ss the matter with you?”

Fine red brick dust coated the fringed shawl wrapped around her as a garment, her headscarf and the long red hair tumbling out of it, her bare burned legs and her bare burned arms and her bare burned face. Aziraphale cupped her cheeks between his hands, healing. “I’m so sorry! I was so busy rowing with the angel who did this I forgot to check for survivors till it was too late. Were these great friends of yours?” He stroked her arms, smoothing away blisters.

“Demonsss don’t have friendssss! They were, they were - marksss.” She hiccuped, and drooped above him, but her golden eyes were dry. “I tempted them till they sssinned sssso bad your ssstupid angelss harvessted them for Hell! Doessssn’t it make you mad, angel? I know you hate thissss kind of thing, you with your peacce and love and healing! Well, the cause of it all is right here! Sssstop lying there like a lump and _fight me_!”

“No, thank you, I would rather not.” He healed a broken finger.

She opened her now-fangless mouth wider than it should have been able to open and wailed: _“Why not, damn it?_”

“I don’t like fighting, you know that.” He stroked the leg burns he could reach. “And besides, I don’t believe you. It’s all right to cry, you know. I won’t tell anyone.”

“Demonsss can’t cry.” She sagged on top of him. “All my tearss burned up when I Fell.”

He took her hands. “Help me up, please. Is there anything we can do for your friends - excuse me, your ‘marks?’ Some funerary rite they would have wanted to be carried out?”

She slid down his torso, braced herself against the hard dirt floor, and pulled them both to their feet. “We never talked about it. And they were poor. The poor of these towns get shoveled into a ditch while the rich get buried with all their fancy stuff piled around them.”

“Is there anything we can do for _you_, then? To mourn them properly?”

She looked at the limp bodies, male and female, old and young, huddled in each others arms, splayed against the wall, half-buried in rubble, and shook her head.

“Then let’s cure your damage and get out of here,” Aziraphale suggested.

She accepted his touch on the damage - not only burns, but broken bones in her foot and hip - with a tameness that hurt his already sore heart, gazing into his face as if waiting for something. “Sorry I dripped on you, angel. I only half meant to. You’ve got some venom spots, there.” She raised her hand as if to touch them.

“Do I?” He passed his hand over the sore place before she made contact. “Better?”

“Beautiful,” she said, flatly. “You’d have made a goodish living here.”

Together they climbed back up to the street level, hand in hand, steadying each other - though that mostly went one way, as Crawly’s lower limbs were as unpredictable as ever. “What do you mean?”

“Rich men who wouldn’t give a good meal in exchange for a good day’s work would go around with a beautiful woman, or boy, on their arms, and take them to banquets, and give them nice things, in exchange for practicing Lust on them. It wasn’t as fun as it sounds, but it kept body and soul together better than day labor.”

“I see. And this was your idea, was it?”

“Me? Naw.” She barked a humorless laugh as he swung her over a fallen beam and back onto the street. “They thought that up in the sixty years since I was here last. All that Lust meant a certain amount of pregnancy, too, and they found it easier to live if they clubbed together. Looked after each others kids and so on. And then they came up with some new tricks. Like - you lure somebody into an alley with your body, and then you and your friends beat the snot out of him and split his stuff. He wasn’t looking at your _face_, and the alley’s dark, so he can’t identify you to the judges. You go to a banquet to let everyone paw at you, and memorize the layout of the house, so when the person who lives there is off at a banquet at _another_ house, you slip in and make off with the contents of their larder or whatever. You have a private assignation with someone with a jealous wife, and your friend ‘catches’ you with him and threatens to spill to the wife unless he coughs up the goods. That sort of thing. I was studying them. And egging them on, of course. These are brilliant ideas that deserve to be better known, especially if ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are going to be a thing from here out.”

“Did a lot of luring, did you?”

“Mostly I was muscle. More satisfying.”

“I see. Tell me about your friends. What were their names?”

She did not object to the term this time. They picked their way through the drifting ash and rubble of the city, out onto the plain, gradually shedding their grime and smoothing their clothes back into respectability. They met no one; all the still-living humans in the countryside were staying in their homes, holding their breaths, leaving their rich barley fields, their vineyards, and their pastures of cattle to their own devices. She told him stories and names; how some were born poor and others became poor on the loss of a family provider; about the doors of family and supposed friends closed in their faces to prevent the calamity of poverty from spreading; about the penalties extracted from the poor for laws broken freely by the rich; about the gangs, and the merchants, and the judges. Aziraphale knew stories like this already; they were the reason the cities came to Heaven’s attention at all; but those stories didn’t include how the poor banded together in mutual support; how unjust laws turned the moral order on its head; how theft to feed a starving child in the teeth of the law rendered theft almost righteous. “I smelled the angels coming and found the cellar for them,” Crawly said. “I thought they’d be safe there. But the air got too hot for them to breathe. So hot it burned. And I tried, but I couldn’t fix them.” She glared at him accusingly, a last flare-up of her anger. “_You_ could have.”

“I could have,” he said, “if I had been there. I wish I had been.” He told her where he had been instead; the whole sorry business, taking care not to say anything specifically accusing against Sandalphon. That was an internal matter.

“I ought to be proud,” she said when he finished. “The robbery gangs, that’s one of mine.”

“You will excuse me for doubting that even you could have made a mess as big as that one, all by yourself.”

She shrugged. “That’s how Hell will see it. Sixty years ago I passed through, and went drinking with some judges. They complained about how many cases of theft they had to deal with and how the theft of a date could take as much or more time as the theft of a golden armband. So I said,_ Why not divide cases up by their size and importance, and give the important ones priority?_ If it took forever for the theft of a date to come to court, most people wouldn’t bother the judges with it. I thought I was encouraging Sloth. I didn’t realize how some bright young thing with Avarice in his heart would realize if he got a gang together to assault somebody, and everybody only stole one thing, no case against any one of them would ever get to court. But Hell’s gonna give me credit, all the same. You got any wine, angel?”

“I’m afraid not.” The air was clearer out here on the plain. He had deliberately walked into the wind, so that the smell of clean pastures and ripening crops blew toward them, and the smell of ash and roasted meat was pushed further and further behind.

“What did I do, angel?” Crawly asked. “Why’d you leave me? I thought we had a good thing going. You ran to help me, I _know_ you did, when you realized Hastur and Ligur were roughing me up. I barely convinced them to leave me to face the scary old angel alone before you got there and healed me, but they _did_ leave and you _were_ there, and everything was going to be fine again. But you _left._ No good-by, no nothing, just, no more Aziraphale. I’d get a sense of you and go looking and you_ must_ have felt me coming but you never waited! I looked for you for _ages_ and when I finally caught up with you it was, it was -“

“It was at the loading of the Ark,” said Aziraphale. “Why did you look for me?” He wondered if she knew the answer herself. Watching her face, cross-lit by the low afternoon light, he thought not.

“I asked you first,” Crawly said, eventually. “What did I do, to make you leave me like that?”

Aziraphale’d met many a human stuck with a choice, not between Right and Wrong, but between Wrong and Equally Wrong. Nothing he’d said to any of them seemed remotely useful to him now. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

She turned on him and he thought for a moment she would try to shake the truth out of him. “Then why’d you go? Why’d you avoid me? You can’t just order me to rest and walk away while I’m asleep and never tell me _why_! You _owe_ me an explanation!”

“No, my dear. Neither of us owes the other anything. That’s the problem.”

“_What?_ _What’s_ the problem? I can’t solve a problem I don’t _understand._”

“You can’t solve this problem at all.”

_“Try me!”_

“All right. All right. But first, answer me this. Why did demons attack you?”

She waved her hands airily. “Because they’re stupid wankers who couldn’t stand that I get to wander around up here unsupervised while they have Beelzebub breathing down their necks in Hell. I convinced ‘em you were a great and terrible scary angel and I’d rather be annihilated than face you wounded and alone and they decided to leave me to my ugly fate and pick up the pieces later. That’s all sorted now. I figured out how to dampen my aura and lay low for a bit, let Hell get the idea I was mysteriously missing, and then I set up an ambush of my own, made Hastur and Ligur look ridiculous, so all’s well with the world. See, what I - no, hang on, this isn’t about me! You don’t get to change the subject. Tell me the damn problem already!”

“If they were willing to hurt you so badly for having more freedom than them, what would they do, if they knew you were breaking bread and sharing in-jokes and generally palling around with that ‘great and terrible scary angel?’”

Crawly looked away and up, as if trying to trace the flight of the vultures passing overhead, all bound for the same place. “I dunno. Who’s going to tell them? You?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then _get_ to the point, already!”

“The point is, you’re a demon and I’m an angel and _it’s not a game!_ The things we do have real consequences!”

“I’m not afraid of the consequences!”

“Aren’t you? Is your memory that short? Because you just took responsibility for the destruction of two towns full of people, and you didn’t sound like you enjoyed it.”

Crawly yelped in indignation. “I was upset when I said that!_ I_ don’t kill people.”

“No, you just talk them into doing things that have consequences, which have _more_ consequences, which have _more_ consequences, and the next thing I know I’m scrambling to salvage someone, _anyone,_ out of a catastrophic wreck that all of Heaven has written off!” Aziraphale realized he was shouting and brought himself up short. “Excuse me, please, it’s been a long day.” They had both stopped walking. He started again.

Crawly scrambled to get ahead of him, walking backward, a gait so erratic he feared she’d fall. “Look, that’s not your fault or mine, all right? Any more than it was the fault of the poor of Sodom and Gomorrah that they lived in a cesspit and couldn’t get out. They did the best they could and they managed to have some good times anyway and that’s all anybody can do. That’s all _we_ can do. If you’d stayed and talked to me sensibly once I was unconcussed -“

“This is exactly why I didn’t. I knew you’d get like this.”

“Like what, reasonable and realistic?”

“No, glib and tempting!”

“I would never -“

“You can’t help it! You’re a demon! You’re very, very _good_ at being a demon and I am very, very _bad_ at being an angel and you make it _harder!_”

Aziraphale walked past her with his head down, then three more strides before he realized her shadow was not slithering after him. He halted and looked back.

Crawly stood in the middle of the road, fringes and hair blowing back from her body, face illuminated to a painful nearly-human beauty by the afternoon light. “If that’s the way you feel about,” she said, loud and clear in the face of the wind, “where are we going and why are we going there together?”

Aziraphale walked three strides back and took her by the hand. “I’m taking you to a safe place before I contact heaven to make my complaint.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? It’s - it’s the thing to do!”

“Seriously? What do you imagine is out here more dangerous than_ me?_”

“Oh, for -“ Aziraphale closed his eyes. “You see what I mean? Even when I’m explicitly thinking about it, I _forget_.”

“Oh, my poor pretty pesky angel,” cooed Crawly, and if he hadn’t been able to feel the love, renewed and redoubled, coming off her, he’d have been able to hear it. “You’re so, so wrong about so many things. Not about me being good at being a demon, because I rule at that, but _you?_ Bad at being an _angel?_ Never, ever, in no way! Look at me.”

He couldn’t stand here with his eyes closed forever, so he did.

“You are the best angel,” Crawly said, practically glowing. “All the others go around smiting and picking and choosing and worrying about who deserves what. While you’re running around trying to take care of everybody. Even me. But you tell me this - who’s taking care of _you_? Mm? Who ever will, if not me?”

“Oh. Well. If I need taking care of -“

“Everybody does. I’ve heard you say so.”

“Well, yes, but ‘everybody’ doesn’t necessarily include _me_! But, _if_ I need taking care of, I have, er, other angels. Gabriel and, and so on. And of course God.”

“Oh, God, sure. Talked to her recently, have you? She tucked you in and brought you something nice to eat and made you sleep for a month or so to recover from frantically swimming around trying to make sure no one who died in the Flood died alone?”

Aziraphale’s spine stiffened. “Whatever case you’re making, you’re not helping it with _that_ line of patter.” (Gabriel had in fact given him a stiff lecture on exceeding his instructions and sent him to the Andes till the need for a Mesopotamian guide arose.)

“All right, all right. But we both know, you can’t have a decent conversation with any of those angels, any more than I can with the other demons. If we were humans -”

“But we’re not. Don’t even _start_ down that road.” He let go of her hand. “We could talk the sun down and up again and it wouldn’t change anything. There’s no point going over and over it. _We can’t be friends._ That’s not your fault or mine, but we can’t. Now. If you’re, well of course you are, as you so correctly point out, you don’t need my escort to the nearest well, and the fact that some Sodom-infected herdsman has fenced it in and is charging people to drink from it can’t be expected to inconvenience you for long, so you go on your way and I’ll submit my complaint from here as soon as there’s no possibility of anyone sensing your aura from the other side of the circle.”

Her eyes narrowed, and the planes of her face hardened. “So that’s it, then? Just, walk off and have a nice life?”

“I think that’s best. Yes. For both of us.” He made his voice as prim and cold as he could, hoping to regain lost ground - or re-lose gained ground, whatever, she _had_ to stop loving him, even if he needed to be an ass to accomplish it - and took a step back. “Good-by, Crawly.”

“All right. But if we’re saying good-by, we’ll do it properly this time.” Quick as a snake, she embraced and kissed him, as they had greeted and parted from each other many times in front of many humans, for whom this was how equals greeted and parted. Brief and businesslike; except that she held the embrace a moment longer than the kiss, and said next to his ear: “And don’t think for one moment that _you_ get to deccide what’ss besst for _me_!”

Crawly strode crookedly off through a pasture, disdaining the road and the bull that charged her, then thought better of it. She’d be at the well before nightfall, and anyone she met who thought he could take advantage of a woman alone in the countryside would get a nasty surprise. Aziraphale watched her out of sight, all the same. A dozen things occurred to him, that he should have said to her, things that would make everything much clearer and simpler and less painful; except that he knew that they would not.

He began the tedious task of building a communication circle on grassy ground, with no candles at hand.

-30-


End file.
